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The start of the New Year is always about reflecting and revising and then revising some more. It’s a great time to alter your strategies and make sure you’re making the most of your time and resources. With SEO being such a dynamic industry, it’s one of the top departments that go through this revision in December. However, there is one big question that some companies forget to ask: How often is too often to revise your SEO strategy?

When and How to Successfully Revise Your SEO Strategy in 2015

The truth is that revision is never a bad thing, but you have to have a plan and you have to give your experiments enough time to run before jumping onto another angle or another way of doing things. For many, December isn’t going to be the ideal time to revise an SEO strategy because they already made changes back in October that still need time to marinate.

Consider below some of the following points to make sure you’re being smart when making changes and not just changing things for the sake of revision. Below also explains a few things you may consider revising in each section to help give you a basis for how to move forward:

When it comes to changes in employee roles, don’t change too much too fast.

This is one of the biggest areas that companies mess up. They decide that it’s time to revise an SEO strategy, and this often means throwing new tasks at certain employees and changing roles to be more efficient. While this may work in a few cases, it’s best to give your employees a good amount of time to ask questions and really get acquainted with their responsibilities. SEO is constantly changing, so throwing staff changes in on top of that could be too much too fast.

Tips for Revision: Instead of changing employee roles, consider revising your meeting schedule and getting your employees working closer together. This will help them communicate with each other and improve upon their work. Then, evaluate who might be able to take on more work (and ask for feedback from your employees) to determine where you can add on new SEO responsibilities that you have all discussed.

Add new features/ initiatives to parts of your SEO strategy that are working well.

There have been many new SEO tools and Google updates that you can take advantage of this coming year, so start by making a list of some of these updates. Instead of trying to implement them all at once, start with just a few at a time and talk with your SEO team about who can handle with new tasks. To start the list for you, a few of the recent SEO updates we saw include:

We saw HTTPS as a new ranking factor.

A Google Penguin and Panda update was launched this year, meaning your team needs to analyze and react.

Google launches mobile friendly labels.

Semantic search becomes more important.

Authorship was removed from Google results.

Tips for Revision: This goes along with the last point. Instead of trying to change your strategy completely, start small by adding on new initiatives and introducing new SEO features you may want to try using. Determine where your SEO strategy is really thriving and then go one step further by adding on some new, more advanced aspects discussed above.

Consider your industry and how often changes occur.

There is a chance that you have been revising your strategy all along and you don’t need to in December (discussed in the introduction). However, this may also be because your industry doesn’t require you to revise too drastically. If there haven’t been many changes, you may only need to update your methods every few months.

Tips for Revision: Read different reports on websites like Market Watch to keep tabs on your industry and how things are changing. Consider also following your competition and seeing how their SEO strategy changes both through their content as well as through their link building, which you can check easily through tools like Open Site Explorer.

If your customers change, your strategy needs to change.

Lastly, you can’t forget about your customers. Always keep a close eye on any changes or trends you see in your audience and your customer base. If they are losing interest in something particular, this is what needs to be revised. This won’t always be affected to your SEO, but see if you can make any connection and go from there.

Tips for Revision: Use Google Analytics reports to monitor your customers and your visitors’ activity. Also consider creating customer personas this year to help keep your customers organized and start offering more customized content.

In the end, just because things are working well doesn’t mean no revision needs to take place. It is possible to revise your strategy too frequently or too drastically that you aren’t actually making improvements, so simply be smart about how you go about revision this upcoming year by using some of the tips discussed above.

What are your thoughts on SEO revision? Do you think it’s possible to revise your strategy too often? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.